Patty McLean came into my office with her biological mom Sarah Tilmon on a Saturday
morning. The slender 13-year-old had never worked with a counselor
before, though she knew her mother had gone to several for "something."
Patty had recently asked her Mom to "talk to somebody" about "something" to
do with her live-in stepfather Jack. Sarah, a vivacious, overweight,
30-something brunette, had called for her own appointment many months
before.
She came in then because of tensions in her one-year-old remarriage to a
wonderful divorced man with two non-custodial kids of his own.
Sarah was
struggling with a collage of personal, parental, and re-marital
"problems." She had a high school education, and worked as a
beautician.
Just before she brought Patty in, she
told me matter-of-factly
that she (Sarah) had been sexually molested at 13. She had had no
professional help in coping with the massive inner wounds that this
trauma
had caused.
As Sarah sketched her stepfamily story, it appeared that she had again
chosen a strong-willed, take-charge partner like her first husband Ted,
though Jack was not
alcoholic as Ted
seemed to be. Eventually Jack came in with
Sarah to support her getting "parenting education." He was a
chiropractor with a successful suburban practice. Jack was compact, talkative, and opinionated – righteously, at times.
A
forceful man in his forties, he felt he had given "his all" to his
former wife Karen and his kids. He was still angry and "mystified"
about Karen’s divorcing him and claiming "irrationally" that he
was "impos-sible to live with." At one point,
this earnest stepdad
said matter-of-factly that his father had deserted him and his mother when
Jack was about six.
Sarah’s second husband was adamant that his (vs. "their") new family
was not a "stepfamily."
His firm opinion was that
"Labels aren’t unimportant, love is!" He was there to provide
love, protection, and strong Christian male guidance to Sarah and Patty,
while being a devoted absent father to his biokids Roger and Annie, and a
responsible health professional in the community. His heart was in the right
place, but...
As I learned more about their stepfamily, it quickly became clear that Jack
had
remarried to save Patty and her Mom from chaos, stress, and worry. As
with many of us
survivors of low-childhood
nurtur-ance, he seemed to see his wife and
stepdaughter (and most things) in rigid, black-and-white terms. Jack’s
views usually netted out that while lovable, his new wife Sarah was
incompetent at just about everything - especially co-parenting her daughter Patty.
Right after their wedding 18 months ago, as the new "head of
the household," Jack had moved into their home and enforced a rigid code of discipline with Patty.
He felt that Sarah "was too soft" on her early-teen daughter. Jack felt
genuine concern that Patty "was headed for (some unspecified) big trouble."
He was steadily contemptuous that Patty’s biofather Ted had "weaseled
out" of his parental re-sponsibilities, leaving Jack to "clean up their
mess." He had no wish to enlist Ted as a
co-parenting teammate despising him for having
abandoned Patty – just as Jack’s own father had left him long ago. He
rarely spoke to Ted or showed any real interest in his life. Both men
steadily avoided (the discomfort of recognizing) each other.
Sarah seemed to be overwhelmed with Jack’s righteous, rigid forcefulness.
She had begun explain-ing lamely to Patty that Jack "really meant
well" - which he did! Sarah’s timid attempts to get Jack to
compromise and "be softer, and make friends" with her daughter earned
condescending monologs on "correct parenting," "it’s for
her own good!", and on Sarah’s inadequacies as a mother and wife.
Jack was completely
unaware that he was continuing a devastating pattern of
over-controlling and
shaming which Sarah had experienced from both her
father and her first husband. I suspect this same attitude and
denial (and other
factors) had destroyed Jack’s first marriage.
It was clear to me that neither Sarah nor Jack knew how to
listen, asset, or
problem-solve effec-tively
as true partners.
Like many troubled couples, they were locked in
a corrosive, lose-lose
values co0nflict over "good parenting."
Because Jack was rigid, unflinching, and "assertive" (i.e. aggressive)
in his views, and Sarah felt poorly about herself as a person and
mother, she felt powerless, intimidated, shamed, guilty, and despairing. She
was getting increasingly angry with her husband, yet didn’t feel safe or
fully justified in expressing it.
Sarah was withdrawing emotionally and physically, which made Jack
"irritable" (i.e. hurt, uneasy, and angry).
As a
shame-based man in major (protective)
denial, he made no apparent con-scious connection
between Sarah’s emotional and physical withdrawals and his former wife
Karen’s decision to leave him.
Sarah brought Patty in that Saturday because the girl was having trouble in
her new school. She had begun hinting to her Mom that she was thinking of
running away. This is a common clinical pattern:
an anxious bioparent or
concerned stepparent will initiate counseling to help a troubled stepchild, rather than admitting and focusing on scary
remarital problems.
I spent half an hour with Patty and her mother to invite the girl building
initial trust in me and our process. When I asked permission to meet
with Patty alone, both agreed. As soon as Sarah left the room, Patty’s
warm brown eyes filled with tears, and her mouth quivered. In escalating
gusts and sobs she told me some of her story.
We met alone several other
times, and a familiar heart-wrenching saga emerged. The early
teen felt hopeless,
unsafe, and
overwhelmed by a set of tensions she could barely describe, let
alone cope with. She knew her mother loved her, but felt angry and
scornful that Sarah wouldn’t "stand up" to her domi-neering
stepfather Jack, and protect her from his endless lectures, rules,
criticisms, and groundings.
Part of Patty’s stepfamily pain was periodic. When her
stepsiblings Annie (13)
and Roger (11) came to visit every other weekend,
she always felt that Jack
favored them over her, despite his righteous, indig-nant denial. Annie would leave her clothes strewn around the house, and her
father never yelled at her the way he did at Patty. Jack was specially
supportive of Roger’s progress at school sports, while he alterna-ted
between indifference to, and criticism of, Patty’s gymnastic efforts.
When the time seemed right, I asked if either of her bioparents had
explained to the girl why they divorced. She dropped her eyes and said
quietly "Well, sort of." Further gentle probing revealed that she
really wasn’t clear on why, and felt much confusion and conflict
about the stress her parent’s
divorce had brought into their lives.
Patty
said sadly that her "real" father
(Ted) really didn’t seem to
care much about her. She des-cribed several instances where he promised to attend school
parent-conferences and gymnastic meets, but never came. "He always has
excuses," she said, without emotion.
When I asked about her father’s
drinking, the slender girl looked away. "It scares me sometimes. Mom
won’t let him drive me anywhere now, because she’s scared we’ll have
an accident. That makes him real angry, because he doesn’t think he has a
problem." I asked "Do you?" Patty nodded silently, looking
away.
Much of Patty’s story was about instances where she felt Jack was unfairly
and harshly critical "over nothing!" He often restricted her phone
calls with friends as punishment for her "bad" school grades (Bs
and Cs), cutting off her main source of human sympathy and support.
"He never listens to me," she grimaced. "When Mom tries to
argue, he just walks all over her. And she lets him! Our life wasn’t all
that great before he came around, but I hate it now!"
I asked if there was any adult in her life who understood how she felt these
days. Patty’s long brown hair swung as she shook her head. Her only nearby
relative was her mother’s sister, who lived about 50 miles away. I asked
if there were things that got in the way of her talking honestly with her
mother.
She nodded, and again looked away. In her soft voice, the girl
eventually was able to tell me she thought her mother was miserable and
scared. "So I can’t tell her how
much I hate Jack in our life. She
has enough problems! You know, she’s already taking some pills for
depression. Then an angry part of Patty emerged: "Why did she
ever marry that dumb jerk, anyway? This is really her fault!" She began
to cry again.
Patty described sadness and frustration about her social life. "Jack
won’t let me have friends in my room. I don’t like to have them over
anyway at night, because he’s such a dork! And Mom is such a wimp!" I
asked how she got along with her stepsister and stepbrother. "Annie’s
all right, I guess. We can talk about some stuff, and we like the same
music. She feels her father’s too strict, too, but she never talks back to
him. Roger is so stuck up. He thinks he’s so great! He sucks up to Jack,
and he (Jack) just eats that up. It makes me sick!"
Patty described at some length her anguish over really liking a boy at
school, and Jack and her mother telling her he "wasn’t her kind of
boy." "What do they know about it?" she declared angrily.
"It’s my life, isn’t it?" She hinted that she was sneaking out
to be with him, "no matter what they think!" I noted silently that
Patty’s big hoop earrings, tight clothes, and overdone makeup signaled
"growing up
too fast, too soon" and her apparent desperation
to attract some male approval and closeness.
I worked with this stepfamily trio individually and together for perhaps 15
sessions before the adults quit. I suggested several times it would be
helpful for Jack, Sarah, and me to meet with the three other co-parents "to
strengthen communications and
teamwork," but both partners balked for
several (surface) reasons. By coincidence or Divine intervention, Jack’s
ex-wife Karen had enrolled herself and her second husband Rick Cohen in a
co-parenting class I gave.
Over seven weeks, I sensed that they were a reasonably stable, healthy
couple who had fully ac-cepted their stepfamily identity and were mutually
eager to learn the basics. An important factor
in their home’s stability was that Rick and his ex wife Sheila had a
relatively co-operative relationship around raising their son
Nicholas (9). They seemed to have genuinely resolved most
around
their separation and
divorce and his remarriage.
Karen and Rick Cohen were respectful of Jack and Sarah and genuinely
concerned for Patty. They were unsure about what they could do for
the young teen, whom they rarely saw. Karen had learned to be firm in
setting clear co-parenting limits with Jack, on visitation, support,
and holiday issues involving Annie and Roger.
She had talked
empathically with Sarah about "how difficult (rigid, patriarchal, and critical) Jack can
be." Karen avoided criticizing or disparaging Jack in front of their kids,
camouflaging some strong
with his personal and parenting
values and methods.
I suspect that the Tilmons (i.e. Jack) stopped consulting me because
we were getting too close to confronting what was really causing the tensions in
their home. I think Sarah and Jack each sensed sub-liminally that they were
heading towards psychological and legal redivorce, but
and
blocked their
shared wish to reverse course.
This struggling couple and their four co-parenting partners and five minor
kids formed a classic ex-ample of the best and the worst in a normal,
complex Anglo-American stepfamily. The combined power of the
was clearly eroding the Tilmon’s remarriage and
home but not the Cohen’s.
My guess was that Patty McLean’s biofather
Ted was a
psychologically-wounded man from a low-nurturance childhood. I
never spoke with him. His reportedly increasing alcohol
addiction and
protective
denials
demonstrated a classic (futile) attempt to self-medicate from relentlessly
escalating
inner pain.
The Five
Hazards at Work
How were the five common family stressors affecting the Tilmon’s home and
relationships? The full description would take book. Here’s an overview...
1)
Unseen Psychological Wounds
As with well over 80% of the ~1,000
divorcing and stepfamily co-parents I’ve worked
with since 1981, Sarah, Jack, and (apparently) Patty’s biofather Ted
seemed to be dominated by mixes of common psychological wounds: a
dominant
which causes
excessive
shame. guilts, and
fears, major
reality
and
trust distortions;
and sometimes difficulty feeling and bonding with
(caring for) others.
They had each developed short-sighted, reactive false self to survive
too little early-childhood
nur-turance. Their respective early caregivers were
probably psychologically-wounded and unaware too.
Their ancestors gave their best, burdened with mixes of these false-self
wounds and personal and social ignor-ance of how to avoid or reduce them.
Jack would have been surprised and irritated (insulted,
defensive, and threatened) to hear that I saw him as badly
"wounded." If I had been frank with him about my opinion, I
believe he’d have quit therapy sooner than he did. He would have gravely agreed
that Ted and Sarah "had major problems." Sarah ack-nowledged
(some of) her inner wounds, but was bewildered about what to
do about them. What wounds?
Sarah’s
personality was
dominated by excessively shamed, guilty, and scared
(plural) and their
vigilant
subselves. Her sexual
molestation at 13, lack of education and other early-nur-turance
deprivations, and her
divorce trauma
all combined to give parts of her personality the half-con-scious certainty that she was a
tainted, disgusting, stupid, inept, bad female person.
This had many
in/direct impacts on her remarriage to Jack and her efforts to mother her
needy, be-wildered daughter Patty. One impact was that Sarah felt the only way she could merit love and support
from a man was through subservience and sexual co-operation. That fit fine for Jack, who needed a de-pendant, compliant,
desirable woman partner to "fix," so he could feel
"good" and avoid looking honestly at himself.
Sarah's ruling subselves were torn between compulsively eating fats and sugars
("comfort foods") to temporarily
numb her ceaseless
and enduring Jack’s (and her own) ridiculing her
extra 50 pounds and "looking like a pig." Her shame, fears, and
other wounds locked her into a verbally-abusive (shaming) marriage by
crippling any belief that she could earn enough to support her and Patty
without Jack’s income.
She (her ruling subselves) felt trapped, inadequate, confused, depressed,
hurt, angry, and increa-singly unhappy. This was increasingly burdening Patty,
on top of trying to
fill her
complex teen-develop-ment and family-adjustment
needs.
Jack was also clearly a shame-based
Grown Wounded Child
(GWC). Though a licensed, competent health-care provider, he
was in classic protective enial of his
false-self wounds and their major
on
him, Sarah, and all three older stepfamily kids.
He had camouflaged his
personality-subselves'
chaos and pain by earning the public image of a successful,
competent chiropractor, and a devoted, non-custodial
Christian-patriarch biofather. Where Sarah's false self used compulsive overeating
to distract from her subselves' relentless inner pain,
Jack's subselves used overwork, covert superiority, and religious dogmatism (vs.
healthy spirituality) to
distract from theirs.
Another false-self wound destroying Jack and Sarah’s second marriages was
their
reality dis-tortions -
perceiving things that aren’t there (illusions), and not seeing things that
are there (denials and repressions). For example, when Jack told Sarah
"I love you," part of him meant it. Another subself meant "I
desire you sexually, and enjoy having you." A third subself meant
"I pity you. Because I’m a good Christian man, I will
patiently rescue and fix you, because you’re incompetent and
floundering."
Like Sarah's (wounded) father,
Jack sent her consistent
mixed messages (a classic symptom of false-self control): "I’ll
gladly commit to you, and want to support and ‘love’ you;" and
"You’re stupid, inept, and hopeless, and will never be able to stand
on your own, so do what I say, be grateful, and don't com-plain."
Another of Jack’s significant reality distortions (denials) was "I
have no need or time for self-explor-ation." A third was
"We are not a stepfamily, so we (I) don’t need
special
education and
support, or to re-examine our family
roles. I am (acting
like) a responsible (bio)father to Patty. I am not a
stepfather." Im-plication and expectation: "Patty better
treat me like (my idea of a) a biodad, and Sarah better go along, or they
are wrong (bad). I know what's best for all of us
(I'm "1-up").
Another
shame-based distortion Jack's
well-meaning false self believed was "I had
little to do with my first divorce. Karen made a major mistake in leaving
me, for which I’ll generously forgive her, as Je-sus would have."
The biggest distortion of all was "I am not majorly wounded
by my father’s early aban-donment and my overwhelmed (badly wounded) mother’s
inability to fill my wholistic needs as a
young boy. I am OK enough!"
No he wasn’t.
Several "Jacks"
Mixed messages are a classic symptom of being ruled by a well-meaning
false self. There were se-veral "Jacks"
(subselves) controlling his thoughts and actions,
well
short of his being a "multiple person-ality." One
was Adult Jack
- a genuinely thoughtful, patient, kind, decisive, and
often fun, grown man. Sarah married this subself, who was prominent during
their courtship.
Another "Jack" emerged after the wedding
music ended. Controlling Jack
was often arrogant, rigid,
closed, domineering, judgmental, and harsh with his wife and
stepdaughter Patty. This
subself was vigorously supported by
Righteous-Christian Jack. He
supplied zealous black/white, moralistic jus-tifications for Controlling Jack’s
actions at home.
Because he was following Biblical scripture (an early-childhood
must, rooted in terror of eternal damnation implanted before
second grade) Controlling Jack
was allied with Jesus and God, and was implacable, unreachable, and inherently
"1-up" (superior).
I
experienced Jack as
unaware, very wounded, and dogmatically religious, pious, rigid,
moralistic, and
defensive, not
spiritual. I suspect if I had said that
(compassionately), his subselves would have politely
pitied, discounted, and dismissed me.
His chiropractic patients and staff saw
Professional Jack,
who was competent, courteous, warm, and trustworthy. Several other "Jacks" were
well hidden from most people: a
Scared Jack
lonely, lost, six year old
Abandoned Jack,
and
Shamed Jack.
This inner child
knew that he was worthless and unlovable because his Dad
had left him, and his mother had let him leave. Sarah's
Good Mom
subself responded instinctively to lonely
young Orphan
Jack
and nurtured and comforted these needy subselves when the other
"Jacks" let her. Sarah's terrified, equally-lonely little
Abandoned
Girl responded powerfully to the strong, decisive,
protective side (subself) of her husband's personality:
Nurturing Jack.
The Web address
of this two-page article is http://sfhelp.org/sf/basics/example.htm
If you're in a stepfamily, please help improve lesson 7